March 29, 2017

Or Does It Shine a Light on Unflattering Aspects of US Political System?

RT television is broadcast on several satellite and cable networks including Dish, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Cable and Verizon although it's not available on all those networks in all markets. It's available from Time Warner cable in San Diego and North County as well as Dish satellite. According to Wikipedia, "RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government. It operates cable and satellite television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in various languages, including English and Russian. ... RT International, based in Moscow, Russia, presents around-the-clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, debates, sports news, and cultural programmes about Russia."

RT has been accused of being a propaganda outlet for Russia, but it's hard to swallow that accusation based on the fact that Larry King, Thom Hartmann, Ed Schultz, Chris Hedges, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, Americans all, are some of the major presenters on RT. Larry King, whose work has been recognized with awards including two Peabodys and 10 Cable ACE Awards, was formerly on CNN. From 1985 to 2010, he hosted the nightly interview television program Larry King Live.

In May 2013 RT America announced that King would be anchoring a new talk show on its network. King said in an advertisement on RT: "I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power, instead of speaking on their behalf." He also brought his Hulu show Larry King Now to RT. As for the accusation that RT helped Trump get elected, Larry King interviewed Trump himself. After introducing the then–GOP nominee as a “good friend,” King proceeded to push back against Trump on a number of issues, including his “secret plan” to defeat ISIS. King also has interviewed American icons like Regis Philbin recently on RT. They don't seem to have any hesitancy about appearing on a supposedly Russian propaganda channel.

Ed Schultz was formerly host of The Ed Show on MSNBC. On July 30, 2015, MSNBC President Phil Griffin announced that the series had been cancelled in an effort to transition the network's 3 to 6 PM programming to more breaking news reporting and less political commentary and opinion. The program aired its final episode on July 31, 2015 without Schultz being present. The real reason that MSNBC got rid of Ed Schultz, in my opinion, was that he was too radical, too supportive of workers and the union movement and too critical of US policy. On January 14, 2016, Schultz announced he would start hosting The News with Ed Schultz on RT America.

Schultz routinely ran segments that criticized Trump. “Who’s gonna stop Donald Trump!?” pleaded Schultz before a segment on how the GOP was worried about the reality-TV star’s unstoppable rise. Schultz also aired an interview with Bernie Sanders, who lambasted Trump’s bigotry and sexism and called Clinton “far and away the superior candidate”.

Despite all the Americans employed by RT, The American intelligence establishment continues to call RT Russian propaganda. The Christian Science Monitor stated: "According to the US intelligence community, this gated complex of buildings, housing the satellite channel RT's ultra-modern studios and bustling newsrooms, is ground zero for a sophisticated Kremlin-funded effort to subvert US and Western democracy." But is it?

An article in the progressive weekly journal, The Nation, RT America Was Not 'Pro-Trump'stated:

US intelligence agencies have pointed toward the Russia Today television channel as part of an ongoing effort to prove the Kremlin conducted a pro-Trump “influence campaign” in the run-up to the presidential election.

The article was sub-titled "American journalists at RT have simply shined a light on unflattering aspects of the American political system."

An article in the Washington Post asserted: "If Russia Today is Moscow’s propaganda arm, it’s not very good at its job"

The ODNI Report Adds Fuel to the Fire

The long-awaited and recently declassified intelligence report into Russian influence in the election (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) claimed that Russia’s “state-run propaganda machine” contributed to this influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to both Russian and international audiences. The report dedicated seven of its 25 pages to RT America.

But it’s not just intelligence agencies characterizing RT America as a vehicle for pro-Trump messaging. The accusation has become a common theme across traditional US media outlets as anti-Russia hawks and both liberal and conservative analysts seek to discredit anyone who strays from the accepted narrative on RT as a Kremlin stooge.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, who hosts the show On Contact, was consistently anti-Trump in his outlook. Hedges has called Trump “woefully unprepared” for the presidency and said his election could mean the creation of a “draconian police state.”

Stalwart liberal Thom Hartmann, who hosts The Big Picture, has aired programs with names like: “Dictator Trump Threatens Free Speech,” “Why Trump’s Cabinet Is a Basket of Deplorables,” “How Trump Could Bring on the Crash of 2016,” “Does Trump Mean the End of the Internet as We Know It?,” “Why Trump’s Win Is a Koch Coup Against Our Democracy” and “Is Donald Trump the Master of BS?”—to name a few.

Are all these guys Communist, excuse me, Russian dupes?

If RT’s critical reporting on the United States is factual—and not even the intelligence report is claiming that it isn’t—then it’s no different from any other channel with an editorial slant, albeit one with far less influence on the American public than mainstream US channels. The disparagement of RT as a Vladimir Putin–controlled engine for pro-Trump propaganda boils down to anger over the fact that the American journalists who work for RT have the audacity to shine a light on unflattering aspects of the American political system. After all even Russia is entitled to a point of view without it being considered some kind of nefarious plot.

Worlds Apart Most Intelligent Discussion Show on TV By Far

Most reputable news sources seem to agree that the US intelligence community's assessment of RT as a source of Russian propaganda is overblown. One of the best RT programs that features intellectual discussion in far more depth than any American TV show is Oksana Boyko's Worlds Apart. Although she is Russian and in many situations defends the Russian point of view, she doesn't hesitate to bring on western diplomats who take the other side. This is hardly what could be called propaganda.

Oksana Boyko, who hosts a polemical interview show twice weekly on RT, defends the channel's approach to news. "I believe that RT serves, to some extent, as a tool of the Russian government. That doesn't compromise me as a journalist or a moral human being. I don't regard Russian foreign policy as inherently immoral."

She argues that the West's tactic for fighting the "information war," as typified in the ODNI report, is to try to shut RT out of the conversation. "The point of their model is not to engage with us or grant us any legitimacy." She says she often invites US officials to come on her show, but they always refuse. "That's too bad, because my preference is to engage."

Ms. Boyko spent two years at the University of Kansas in the early 2000s on a US State Department grant aimed at developing democracy. She says it was money well spent. "I benefited a lot [from studying in the US] and think I'm still working to develop democracy. I love the United States, and I don't conflate the government with the people," she says.

Ms. Boyko engages political scholars and diplomats from all over the world (sans the US) in interesting discussions of real issues, a far cry from anything that can be found on other channels including the major news networks. The intellectual content of her show and others, like Chris Hedges', far surpasses the intellectual content of any shows on American TV. American media news shows have to be entertaining rather than factual in order to draw eyeballs, enhance ratings and attract advertisers who pay the bills. They are infotainment rather than in depth discussions of issues. As such they precipitate angry interchanges among talking heads to rev up the entertainment value of their "news."

It seems that the biased piece of reportage here is the ODNI report which is the declassified version of the intelligence community's assessment of the Russian influence on the US election. That report devoted 7 of its 25 pages to the role of RT in influencing the recent US Presidential election. The RT's head of communications, Anna Belkina, says she was amazed when RT was singled out and described at length as a major threat to America. ... "I have the impression that report was compiled by people who never bothered to watch RT for a single afternoon. Our actual programming bears no resemblance to the tropes presented there, or in the popular media," says Ms. Belkina.

No one disputes that RT is growing in popularity as a source of alternative news. It is even outpacing Al Jazeera, the BBC and Voice of America! Maybe that's why the US intelligence establishment is trying to shut it down. There's more intelligent discussion of issues facing the world today than can be found anywhere on US media including the major networks.

Afshin Rattansi, who hosts a talk show three times a week called “Going Underground,” came to RT in 2013 after working at the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera and Iran’s Press TV. “Unlike at the BBC and CNN, I was never told what to say at RT,” he said.

Is RT critical of the US point of view? You bet. And so are an ever increasing number of American citizens. In 2012 RT was nominated for its coverage of Occupy Wall Street for an International Emmy, the most prestigious award in television, in the News category. RT became one of the first TV networks to provide an in-depth coverage of the Occupy protests from their inception. As an open society that values free speech, the US should just deal with other points of view even when they come from another part of the world like Russia.

And by the way ...

Russia's Total Military Budget Is Less Than Trump's Increase

Russia cut its defense budget by 25% from $65 billion to $48 billion according to Janes: "Figures released by the Russian Federal Treasury have confirmed that Russia's defense budget has been cut by 25.5% for 2017, falling from RUB 3.8 trillion (USD 65.4 billion) to RUB 2.8 trillion. The reduction represents the largest cut to military expenditure in the country since the early 1990s." Meanwhile, Trump increased the US military budget by $54 billion to $639 billion, an increase that's more than the entire Russian defense budget. Are we winning the Cold War all over again? Who's the aggressor here? I guess it's not the US as long as you believe that the lie by George W Bush that launched the Iraq war and all the money spent on regime change by Obama, both of which precipitated the largest refugee crisis in human history, were justified and well worth it.

America needs an enemy, a BIG enemy, in order to justify its ungodly, ginormous defense budget. And Russia fills the bill for that ... again. Without enemies, big and small, in the world the US economy which is predicated on military expenditures would collapse. A renewed Cold War is just the thing to keep the American military machine going. Instead of engaging with Russia to fight terrorism, US policy makers are intent on demonizing Russia. It's deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say.

March 25, 2017

Was Arrow's Impossibility Theorem an Endorsement of Free Market Capitalism?

Kenneth Arrow, Nobel prize winning economist, passed away February 21, 2017 at the age of 95 at his home near Stanford University where he was Professor Emeritus. He was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel prize. Dr. Arrow made many academic contributions, but chief among them was his Impossibility Theorem. It is an example in my opinion of the over mathematization of the social sciences. As such it is absolutely elegant and correct as a mathematical theorem, but it's implications on a practical level, that capitalist economics and representative government are the best a society can do, even Arrow would not defend in later life. In fact he suggested at the age of 90 that further research would come up with ways to work around his system if not to discredit it altogether. However, the damage had already been done. Capitalism, as evidenced by his nephew, Larry Summers, was exalted and welfare economists and political reformers were stopped in their tracks.

Larry Summers is an economist and President Emeritus of Harvard University. He served as the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and the Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama. He was the one who pushed Clinton for deregulation of the Glass-Steagall Act which led directly to the 2008 financial meltdown. When he was President of Harvard, he gained notoriety for a sexist remark in a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end," and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Summers evidently took his uncle's Impossibility Theorem to heart and championed free market capitalism. An encomium to his uncle can be found here.

“I think the answer is you have to ask, in effect, which ones get closest to this combination? And we have to then begin to look at what actual votes are. The real way we do this is to apply some rule and to take elections and apply different methods and see what violates these conditions as little as possible. Remember all we’re saying is there could be a [violation]. We’re not saying you’re always getting a violation of these rules.”

What Arrow was saying is that there are other political and economic systems that, while not perfect according to his criteria, were nevertheless possibly better than what we have today. In fact Arrow decried the pitfalls of winner-take-all (plurality) voting which does satisfy his criteria. It chooses one winner out of a number of candidates and is the method used in almost all US elections including the election for President.

“I think plurality voting leads to very unsatisfactory solutions in a number of cases. Now, there is a problem which certainly my social choice theorem didn’t address and a lot of discussions don’t address about elections, which is the long-run implications of an electoral system on parties.

“Partly, if you have a plurality system, you’re kind of driven to a two-party system. If a party splits, both factions lose because they’re less likely to get a plurality. So there’s some pressure to create two-party systems.

“Now some people have argued that two-party systems are a good idea. And others say no. It stifles innovation. It stifles real contest. New ideas are suppressed in a two-party system. I’m inclined to the latter view that if there really are a number of political positions, it’s better they be raised explicitly.

“The plurality system chokes off free entry. In other words, in the economic world we’re accustomed to the virtues of free entry. We don’t want a small number of corporations to be dominant. We favor the idea of new firms entering in order to compete to bring in new ideas, to bring in new products.

“Well, the same way in the political field. We should be encouraging free entry, I think, in order to have new political ideas come in. And they may flourish. They may fade. That’s what you want, them to be available.

“So I’m inclined that the plurality system will choke off by encouraging, the two-party system will choke off new entry. So I’m really inclined to feel that we don’t want plurality as a voting system. It’s likely to be very stifling."

Social Choice: Mathematics Meets the Social Sciences

Social choice is an esoteric, abstruse and specialized subject generally only of interest to the academic community and then only to those interested in political or economic science. In this article I will try to simplify the concepts and point out how they could be applicable in developing more democratic political and economic systems. In 1951, Kenneth Arrow published his book, Social Choice and Individual Values, in which he claimed that the amalgamation of individual choices whether in a political system (voting, for example) or in an economic system (consumer choice, for example) to form an overall social choice (such as the winner of an election, for example) was impossible if you postulated a simple set of (supposedly) rational and ethical criteria. As Arrow stated in the first sentence of his book, "In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make 'political' decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make 'economic' decisions." He goes on to say, “The methods of voting and the market … are methods of amalgamating the tastes of many individuals in the making of social choices.” They are similar in that both involve collective choice among a limited range of alternatives.

Arrow than went on to make a lengthy mathematical analysis, at the culmination of which he asserted that social choice was impossible. This has come to be known as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. For this and other work in a distinguished career, Arrow won the Nobel prize in economics in 1972. The fact that social choice was apparently impossible put the kibosh on any further work in this field and led to much despair among voting theorists and welfare economists. If there is no rational way to make social decisions based on the amalgamation of individual ones, not only welfare economics but any hope for economic democracy is ruled out. Also democratic voting systems other than majority rule in first-past-the-post (plurality), one member districts are ruled out. The dichotomy between political and economic systems remains with the implication being that representative democracy and capitalist economics are the best systems that can be attained. Amartya Sen in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said, "Two centuries after the flowering of the ambitions of social rationality, in Enlightenment thinking and in the writings of the theorists of the French Revolution, the subject seemed to be inescapably doomed."

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty

Let's take a look at Arrow's analysis. As a simple example let's take a voting system in which there are three candidates: A, B and C and three voters: 1, 2 and 3. Arrow postulates that each voter will rank the candidates in order of preference i.e. A is preferred to B is preferred to C would be indicated ABC. One of Arrow's criteria is that for every possible arrangement of voter preferences there should be a unique social choice consisting of one and only one ranking, for example, ABC.

So what about the case when voter 1 votes ABC, voter 2 votes BCA and voter 3 votes CAB? If we let ABC be the social choice, we notice that two out of three voters preferred C to A so that can't be it. Likewise for BCA and CAB. This phenomena is called the paradox of voting and was discovered by the Marquis de Condorcet in the 1700s. Arrow could have stopped right there and said that social choice was impossible according to his terms, but he didn't. He went on to mathematicize the heck out of the problem reaping much credit in the process. The stopped progress in social theory is at least partly due to the fact that no one has been able to come up with a more elegant mathematical analysis!

But wait a minute. Is Arrow's set-up of the problem even realistic? I say it's not. Arrow demands that a social choice be a complete ordering such as ABC. That's neither realistic nor necessary. For multiple candidates and multiple winners, all that's necessary is to know which ones are in the winning set, not their order. For instance, if A, B, C and D are candidates, and the outcome produces two winners rather than one, the only necessary information is which two winners, not their ordering. If A and B are both winners such as in a two member district, for example, we don't need to know if A is preferred to B or vice versa.

Proportional Representation is a voting system for choosing multiple winners and has been around for years. Whereas first-past-the-post (plurality), single member districts lead to a two party system, Proportional Representation induces a multi-party Congress or Parliament in accordance with the percentage of votes received by the party. While a big improvement over majority rule, proportional representation has no theoretically optimal underpinning.

Arrow states: "In the theory of consumer's choice, each alternative would be a commodity bundle; ... ; in welfare economics, each alternative would be a distribution of commodities and labor requirements." It is clear that in consumer's choice, the collective choice mechanism would narrow down the possible number of commodity bundles to a "limited range of alternatives" in which case there would be no need to order each alternative in the "limited range." Consumers would just choose the commodity bundle that represented their highest preference.

So Arrow's fundamental assumptions were somewhat arbitrary to say the least. But other academics were so impressed with his mathematical prowess that they gave him the Nobel Prize. And evidently Arrow, rather than continuing work which might have shown the limitations of his Impossibility Theorem, was content to sit on his laurels and be a respected professor at Stanford University, a conservative enclave if there ever was one. (Truth in advertising: I'm a graduate of Stanford University.)

Economic Democracy, Co-ops and Shift Scheduling

As for welfare economics, there are also implications of social choice for economic democracy. We envision cooperative enterprises in which worker/owners freely choose their shift and pay preferences from the totality of possibilities in accordance with a social choice mechanism which maximizes collective satisfaction among all worker/owners. Today already shift scheduling software is available for nurses on a first come, first served basis. In a profit making environment the scheduling software is more about reducing overtime costs and costs in general than it is about maximizing shift satisfaction among employees, but that would change in an employee owned enterprise.

Arrow assumes that all information will be gathered from the voters or worker/consumers in the form of rankings (A is preferred to B is preferred to C etc). However, there is another form of indicating preferences over candidates and that is ratings. A citizen can indicate preferences by rating candidates on a scale consisting of real numbers between zero and one or minus one and plus one. The scale itself is arbitrary. Then the social choice is made by adding up the numbers for each candidate over all individual choosers. This is called utilitarian voting. Clearly, this method will yield consistent and rational results. It is also called range voting or score voting which was reinvented by Warren D. Smith. Utilitarianism as a philosophy was invented by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, 19th century English philosophers, who defined their system as "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Two guys, Brams and Fishburn, came up with a method of voting called approval voting. They said just give every candidate you approve of a one and all others a zero and then tally up the votes. The candidate with the highest number of votes was declared the winner. The problem is how do you choose which candidates to approve in an optimal manner?

I have had a lot of animosity towards Arrow in my lifetime because of his Impossibility Theorem. I have a website dedicated to proving him wrong. Why didn't he go on to study what was possible even if it wasn't perfect according to his seemingly rational (but not really) criteria? There must be a workaround or a compromise for surely nothing is really impossible. But how dare I or anyone else criticize such a formidable mathematical analysis? Well, I do. Did the conditions he set up doom his theoretical outcome to failure? I think so. Did Arrow stop there because he was an apologist for the capitalist system and the traditional US method of voting? Did he bask in the approval of free market capitalists who liked nothing better than for someone to prove theoretically that any system other than capitalism was fatally flawed? I think so. Did he gain brownie points because he supposedly proved that the American political system rested on a firm theoretical footing while parliamentary democracy did not? You bet.

Ah well, may he rest in peace and may other economists and political scientists not be stymied by his overly mathematical but soulless result. As it turns out Arrow's conditions don't have much to do with the real world. His analysis represents a theoretical result which amounts to proving how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I guess the Nobel committee was impressed by such mathematical legerdemain.

March 18, 2017

The new American Health Care Act has been unveiled, and critics are calling it more flawed even than the Obamacare it was meant to replace. Dubbed “Ryancare” or “Trumpcare” (over the objection of White House staff), the Republican health care bill is under attack from left and right, with even conservative leaders calling it “Obamacare Lite”, “bad policy”, a “warmed-over substitute,” and “dead on arrival.”

The problem for both administrations is that they have been trying to fund a bloated, inefficient, and overpriced medical system with scarce taxpayer funds, without capping its costs. US healthcare costs in 2016 averaged $10,345 per person, for a total of $3.35 trillion dollars, a full 18 percent of the entire economy, twice as much as in other industrialized countries.

Ross Perot, who ran for president in 1992, had the right idea: he said all we have to do is to look at other countries that have better health care at lower cost and copy them.

So which industrialized countries do it better than the US? The answer is, all of them. They all not only provide healthcare for the entire population at about half the cost, but they get better health outcomes than in the US. Their citizens have longer lifespans, fewer infant mortalities and less chronic disease.

President Trump, who is all about getting the most bang for the buck, should love that.

Hard to Argue with Success

The secret to the success of these more efficient systems is that they control medical costs. According to T. R. Reid in The Healing of America, they follow one of three models: the “Bismarck model” established in Germany, in which health providers and insurers are private but insurers are not allowed to make a profit; the “Beveridge model” adopted in Britain, where most healthcare providers work as government employees and the government acts as the single payer for all health services; and the Canadian model, a single-payer system in which the healthcare providers are mostly private.

A single government payer can negotiate much lower drug prices – about half what we pay in the US – and lower hospital prices. Single-payer is also much easier to administer. Cutting out the paperwork can save 30 percent on the cost of insurance. According to a May 2016 post by Physicians for a National Health Program:

"Per capita, the U.S. spends three times as much for health care as the U.K., whose taxpayer-funded National Health Service provides health care to citizens without additional charges or co-pays. In 2013, U.S. taxpayers footed the bill for 64.3 percent of U.S. health care — about $1.9 trillion. Yet in the U.S. nearly 30 million of our citizens still lack any form of insurance coverage.The for-profit U.S. health care system is corrupt, dysfunctional and deadly. In Canada, only 1.5 percent of health care costs are devoted to administration of its single-payer system. In the U.S., 31 percent of health care expenditures flow to the private insurance industry. Americans pay far more for prescription drugs. Last year, CNN reported, Americans paid nearly 10 times as much for prescription Nexium as it cost in the Netherlands."

Single payer, or Medicare for All, is the system proposed in 2016 by Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. It is also the system endorsed by Donald Trump in his book The America We Deserve. Mr. Trump confirmed his admiration for that approach in January 2015, when he said on David Letterman:

"A friend of mine was in Scotland recently. He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said, ‘There’s no charge.’ Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean we could have a great system in this country."

Contrary to the claims of its opponents, the single-payer plan of Bernie Sanders would not have been unaffordable. Rather, according to research by University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Gerald Friedman, it would have generated substantial savings for the government:

"Under the single-payer system envisioned by “The Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act” (H.R. 676), the U.S. could save $592 billion – $476 billion by eliminating administrative waste associated with the private insurance industry and $116 billion by reducing drug prices…."

According to OECD health data, in 2013 the British were getting their healthcare for $3,364 per capita annually; the Germans for $4,920; the French for $4,361; and the Japanese for $3,713. The tab for Americans was $9,086, at least double the others. With single-payer at the OECD average of $3,661 and a population of 322 million, we should be able to cover all our healthcare for under $1.2 trillion annually – well under half what we are paying now.

The Problem Is Not Just the High Cost of Insurance

That is true in theory; but governments at all levels in the US already spend $1.6 trillion for healthcare, which goes mainly to Medicare and Medicaid and covers only 17 percent of the population. Where is the discrepancy?

For one thing, Medicare and Medicaid are more expensive than they need to be, because the US government has been prevented from negotiating drug and hospital costs. In January, a bill put forth by Sen. Sanders to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada was voted down. Sanders is now planning to introduce a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, for which he is hoping for the support of the president. Trump indicated throughout his presidential campaign that he would support negotiating drug prices; and in January, he said that the pharmaceutical industry is “getting away with murder” because of what it charges the government. As observed by Ronnie Cummins, International Director of the Organic Consumers Association, in February 2017:

"[B]ig pharmaceutical companies, for-profit hospitals and health insurers are allowed to jack up their profit margins at will….Simply giving everyone access to Big Pharma’s overpriced drugs, and corporate hospitals’ profit-at-any-cost tests and treatment, will result in little more than soaring healthcare costs, with uninsured and insured alike remaining sick or becoming even sicker."

Besides the unnecessarily high cost of drugs, the US medical system is prone to over-diagnosing and over-treating. The Congressional Budget Office says that up to 30 percent of the health care in the US is unnecessary. We use more medical technology than in other countries, including more expensive diagnostic equipment. The equipment must be used in order to recoup its costs. Unnecessary testing and treatment can create new health problems, requiring yet more treatment, further driving up medical bills.

Drug companies are driven by profit, and their market is sickness – a market they have little incentive to shrink. There is not much profit to be extracted from quick, effective cures. The money is in the drugs that have to be taken for 30 years, killing us slowly. And they are killing us. Pharmaceutical drugs taken as prescribed are the fourth leading cause of US deaths, according to a Harvard study.

The US is the only industrialized country besides New Zealand that allows drug companies to advertise pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma spends more on lobbying than any other US industry, and it spends more than $5 billion a year on advertising. Lured by drug advertising, Americans are popping pills they don’t need, with side effects that are creating problems where none existed before. Americans compose only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we consume 80 percent of the world’s pain pills. We not only take more drugs (measured in grams of active ingredient) than people in most other countries, but we have the highest use of new prescription drugs, which have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious adverse reactions after they have been approved.

The US death toll from prescription drugs taken as prescribed is now 128,000 per year. As Jon Rappaport observes, with those results Big Pharma should be under criminal investigation. But the legal drug industry has grown too powerful for that. According to Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, writing in 2002:

"The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion). Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has [become] a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, [using] its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself."

It’s Just Good Business

US healthcare costs are projected to grow at 6 percent a year over the next decade. The result could be to bankrupt not only millions of consumers but the entire federal government.Obamacare has not worked, and Ryancare is not likely to work. As demonstrated in many other industrialized countries, single-payer delivers better health care at half the cost that Americans are paying now.

Winston Churchill is said to have quipped, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” We need to try a thrifty version of Medicare for all, with negotiated prices for drugs, hospitals and diagnostic equipment.

Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and a Research Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. She is the author of a dozen books including the best-selling Web of Debt, on how the power to create money was usurped by a private banking cartel; and The Public Bank Solution, on how the people can reclaim that power through a network of publicly-owned banks. She has written over 300 articles, posted at EllenBrown.com; and co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown.”

March 13, 2017

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II. “It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss. A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

March 07, 2017

Alarmed by the corruption and greed of Wall Street, many US cities and states are studying the feasibility of establishing public banks. Public banks are owned by cities, states or other jurisdictions and serve to keep funds local instead of being deposited on Wall Street. The funds are then used to support local economic activities like small business loans and student loans.

Washington state has already cut its ties with Wells Fargo because they funded DAPL. Now they want to get rid of Wall Street as a place to park their money making use of the local economy and profiting the people of Washington instead of the bankers of Wall Street. Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.

Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt and The Public Banking Solution writes:

The bills, House Bill 1320 and Senate Bill 5238, propose creation of a Washington Investment Trust (WIT) to “promote agriculture, education, community development, economic development, housing, and industry” by using “the resources of the people of Washington State within the state.”

Currently, all the state’s funds are deposited with Bank of America. HB 1320 proposes that, in the future, “all state funds be deposited in the Washington Investment Trust and be guaranteed by the state and used to promote the common good and public benefit of all the people and their businesses within [the] state.”

The legislation is similar to that now being studied or proposed in states including Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, California and others.

Santa Fe, NM Considers Public Bank as Trump Threatens to Take Away Funding for Sanctuary Cities

The Mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico has declared his city to be a sanctuary city in which case Trump has threatened to deny Federal monies to the city. The Mayor noted that Santa Fe had welcomed immigrants for over 400 years. A public bank could replace that funding:

If McEvers [interviewer from NPR] had asked what possible sources of funding might replace the money Trump is threatening to take away, Gonzales might have answered that Santa Fe was in the advanced stages of considering the creation of a publicly owned bank. In late October, three City Council members introduced a resolution to take the “final steps to determine” whether a public bank would be feasible. Earlier in 2016, a local advocacy group named Banking on New Mexico released a five-year model projecting that a Santa Fe bank could reduce debt service costs by $1 million a year and earn an annual profit, netting the city over $10 million in the bank’s first five years. While that wouldn’t completely offset funds the new administration is threatening to withhold, it would put the city in better shape to absorb the loss and begin the process of building an autonomous local economy that over time could transcend much of the need for federal dollars.

RESOLUTION DIRECTING THE CITY ADMINISTRATOR TO PREPAREAN INFORMATIONAL REPORT WITH THE COST ESTIMATES OFCOMMISSIONING A STUDY ANALYZING THE FEASIBILITY ANDECONOMIC IMPACT OF ESTABLISHING A PUBLIC BANK FOR ORINCLUDING THE CITY OF OAKLAND, AND PROVIDING FUNDINGOPTIONS FOR THE FEASIBILITY STUDY, INCLUDING THE OPTIONOF ALLOCATING TO THE STUDY ANY REMAINDER OF THE MONEYTHAT WAS BUDGETED FOR THE GOLDMAN SACHS DEBARMENTPROCEEDINGS.

WHEREAS, a public bank can have investment priorities that focus on the creation of jobs in Oakland that spur local economic growth by providing affordable credit to small and medium-sized businesses that have been historically ignored by the larger, more established banks; and

WHEREAS, a public bank can have investment priorities that center on providing loans for low and moderate income housing to help relieve the current housing crisis facing Oakland; and

WHEREAS, a public bank can have investment priorities that provide loans for energy conservation, installation of solar panels and measures for conserving water in Oakland; and

WHEREAS, there is a desire for local funding solutions that reinvest public funds in the local community; and

WHEREAS, public banking operates in the public interest, through institutions owned by the people through their representative governments; and

WHEREAS, public banks are able to return revenue to the community and can provide low-cost financing in support of City policies; and

WHEREAS, on September 8, 2016, Wells Fargo bank was fined $185 million for fraudulently opening up accounts without customers' consent, which then damaged customers' credit scores and caused customers to be charged illegal banking fees; and

WHEREAS, on May 20, 2015, Citigroup Inc. and JP Morgan Chase & Co. agreed to plead guilty to felony charges for conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged in the foreign currency exchange spot market; and

WHEREAS, on May 20, 2015, Citigroup Inc. agreed to pay a criminal fine of $945 million and JP Morgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay a criminal fine of $550, for illegally manipulating the foreign exchange market; and

WHEREAS, on May 20, 2015, the Federal Reserve announced that it was imposing a separate set of fines on Citigroup, Inc. and JP Morgan Chase & Co. of $342 million for their illegal practices in the foreign exchange markets; and

WHEREAS, on March 9th, 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wall Street banks had paid in total more than $100 billion in fines and penalties for mortgage-related fraud, and

WHEREAS, said Wall Street banks' criminal conduct and wrongful behavior should not be rewarded with future business dealings with Oakland; and

WHEREAS, the City of Oakland is tasked with holding and protecting the fundamental interest of the public as well as the financial well being of the City; now, therefore be it

RESOLVED: That the Oakland City Council directs the City Administrator, or his/her designee, to prepare an informational report with the cost estimates of commissioning experts in public banking to conduct a study analyzing the feasibility and economic impact of establishing a public bank for the City of Oakland;

Please note that these are only a few of the "Whereas's". There's more.

Profits to the People

Currently, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is the only public bank in the country. All other states and cities deposit their revenues and pension funds with Wall Street with the profits going to Wall Street. That's why so many states are in dire straits while North Dakota's fiscal situation is just fine.

[A]lmost everywhere the fiscal crisis of states has grown more acute. Rainy day funds are drained, cities and towns have laid off more than 200,000 people, and Arizona even has leased out its state office building…

“It’s the time of the once unthinkable,” noted Lori Grange, deputy director of the Pew Center on the States. “Whether there are tax increases or dramatic cuts to education and vital services, the crisis is bad.”

Is it any wonder that President Pussy Grabber and his Republican cohorts are calling for the privatization of everything? Their mantra is that government is incompetent when the true fault lies in the fact that states and municipalities are being bled to death by Wall Street. Wall Street banks borrow money from the Fed at zero percent interest and then loan it to municipalities at 5% interest. That profit could go to the municipalities. The antidote for that is to establish a public bank from which profits will flow to the people as they have in North Dakota. Local control of local money should be the mantra.

There is a move in Congress to let states go bankrupt the way many US cities have. For instance, San Bernardino, CA; Stockton, CA; Orange County, CA; Jefferson County, AL; and Detroit, MI have all declared bankruptcy with the result that concomitant pension fund and contractual obligations to unions and others have gone by the wayside. While those and other cities have been drained by the Wall Street banking crisis which resulted in increased borrowing costs and loss of revenues, BND and North Dakota have churned along quite nicely, thank you very much. They have provided low cost affordable loans to small businesses and students, thus totally averting the worst effects that most cities and states which rely on Wall Street have suffered.

BND provides back-up for local private banks by offering check clearing services and liquidity support. They invest in North Dakota municipal bonds to provide economic development. In the last ten years, the BND has returned more than a third of a billion dollars to the state’s general fund. North Dakota is one of the few states to consistently post a budget surplus.

Washington State Representative Bob Hasegawa, a prime sponsor of the Washington legislation, called the proposal for a publicly-owned bank “a simple concept that will reap huge benefits for Washington.” In a letter to constituents, he explained, “The concept (is) to keep taxpayers’ money working here in Washington to build our economy. Currently, all tax revenues go into a ‘Concentration Account’ held by the Bank of America. BoA makes money off our money and we never see those profits again. Instead, we can create our own institution and keep taxpayers’ dollars here in Washington, working for Washington.”

Dennis Ortblad writes in the Seattle Times: "In fact, we propose a public bank in Washington that lends primarily to public institutions — such as school districts, affordable housing programs, public utilities — in order to reduce the state’s or a municipality’s reliance on the expensive bonds and fees in Wall Street markets." While President Pussy Grabber, Betsy DeVos and Repubs in general want to privatize everything, a public bank would help to shore up public enterprises like the public school system and local infrastructure. BND has a sterling credit record and earned for the state $130 million in 2015 alone, with total assets of $7.4 billion (its 12th consecutive year of record profits for the people of the state). That $130 million would have gone to Wall Street in any other state.

The US banking system including its central bank, the Federal Reserve, is privately owned. Is it any wonder that during the banking crisis of 2008, the first and only order of business was to bail out the banks, not homeowners who were over due in their mortgages? They were hung out to dry despite the fact that many were told the bank would "help" them either by lowering interest rates, refinancing or forgiving principle in "underwater" mortgages. A public banking system is beholden not to private interests but to the people of the state or city in which it's registered.

The Seattle City Council has unanimously voted to end the city's relationship with Wells Fargo over the bank's financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), its financing of private prison companies, and a regulatory scandal involving the bank's creation of two million unauthorized accounts.

All nine council members voted to take $3 billion of city funds away from the bank after Seattle's current contract expires in 2018. The vote occurred just hours after the Army notified Congress that it will be granting an easement allowing DAPL builders to drill under the Missouri River following a presidential memo from Donald Trump.

That $3 billion could find a home in a Seattle or Washington state public bank when one becomes available. All they have to do is mimic North Dakota's public bank which has been working well for over 100 years. The Public Banking Institute is working on a model which could be replicated in cities and states throughout the US. All city council members would have to do is to vote to replicate the model.

One Seattle City Council member who is determined to bring about a public bank is Kshama Sawant. She is an American socialist politician, activist and member of the Socialist Alternative. A former software engineer, Sawant became a socialist activist and part-time economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States. Sawant ran unsuccessfully for the Washington House of Representatives before winning her seat on the Seattle City Council. Sawant was the first socialist to win a city-wide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916. Socialist Alternative describes itself as "a community of activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; fighting for living wage jobs and militant, democratic unions; and people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia."

A public bank could cut the cost of building public schools in Washington in half. Half the cost of building new schools is in interest paid to banks and bondholders. That would all come back to state or city coffers depending on whether the schools were financed by a state or city public bank.

Cut spending, fire teachers, raise taxes—these are the solutions always proposed to offset Washington State’s budget deficits. The state’s budget crises do not arise from too much spending or too little taxation on the poor and middle class. Instead, since 2000, corporate tax breaks in Washington State have more than doubled. The state simply isn't getting enough tax revenue from corporations (see: realwashingtonstatebudget.info).

Also, since the 2008 financial market collapse, banks have cut back on lending. When small local businesses can't secure low interest loans, there are lay-offs and business closures in the private sector, which also cause state revenues to plummet. To solve this problem, since 2010, 17 states, including Washington State, have drafted legislation to establish public banks based on the successful Bank of North Dakota.

A Public Bank for Cities in San Diego County

There is a local movement to create a public bank in San Diego. A group has been meeting regularly and is studying the possibilities for several cities within San Diego County. They are meeting with Council people and hope to use the Oakland Resolution cited partially above as a first step in getting the ball rolling.

Notwithstanding some setbacks and some attrition of the ranks, our courageous group continues to fight for banking reform and the creation of public banks throughout California. We have been encouraged by the recent success in Oakland with the unanimous approval of the Public Banking Resolution by their City Council. It gives us hope! We need referrals to the mayors, city Council members and finance directors for the 18 incorporated cities in San Diego County to stop our money from flowing to Wall Street!

If you are interested in getting involved with the public banking movement in San Diego County, contact Ian Mackenzie at 858-279-4370 or ianmackenzie24@gmail.com.

March 03, 2017

Amazon Go is the latest job destroyer by virtue of the fact that it is a grocery store with no check-out lines. High tech devices will monitor every item you put in your high tech grocery basket so you just load up and go. Your credit card will be charged the correct amount. It isn't clear if a robot will bag your groceries or if you'll do that yourself. This feat of automation is only the harbinger of things to come. With artificial intelligence and robots, jobs will be automated out of existence except for a few software engineers who will design the various systems.

So far there is only one store open and that's in Seattle, but soon ... soon check-out cashiers can kiss their jobs good-bye. By the same token truck drivers will be losing their jobs to self-driving trucks. This technology is well along (it's in beta as they say in the tech world). Already self checkout is underway at Home Depot and many supermarkets. Amazon Go is just taking self-checkout to the next level. I suppose, if they're out of an item, Amazon Prime will have it delivered to your house by drone within a few hours. Bank tellers have already been replaced by ATM machines although a few are still needed for those sticky situations that only a human can deal with.

I suppose the shopping experience will also include text messages or alerts which sense what you want to purchase and then try to upsell you. Why buy that hunk of cheese when for just a few dollars more you could get artisan cheese made locally at a vintage shop? And as for coupons, that will all be handled electronically. You would just scan them with your smartphone, and they would automatically be deducted from your bill. As you continue to shop, Amazon would be gathering valuable information about your purchases so it can suggest other items you might be interested in.

It’s not that retail tech companies haven’t already been hard at work tracking people as they explore physical stores and shop. A host of companies with names like RetailNext, Euclid, and Nomi, among others, are all part of this trend. It’s in a store’s interest to track people because they can target and upsell customers on more products and in-store promotions. When you go home and go online, the first ad you see might be for a product that the data acquired during your shopping experience suggests that you might need or want.

Just Tell Alexa What You Need

The Amazon app Alexa already responds to voice commands in your home. It's not a stretch that this technology might be incorporated in your smartphone so all you'd need to do is say "Hey, Alexa, where's the craft beer, and also I need a bouquet of flowers." Then Alexa might come back and say, "Why don't you get that special someone a box of chocolates too?" Then you'd say, "That's a great suggestion, Alexa, I'd like a dozen red roses, but I want to have them delivered to her home on Valentine's day." Alexa would come back, "No problem, Mr. Mertz." You see Alexa already knows the address of that special someone.

Or why even go to the store? Just tell Alexa your shopping list and she'll have it delivered within the next couple of hours. You'll need a personal robot, however, to put all the stuff away. That may be coming soon.

Amazon is capable of deploying an array of cameras and sensors to control this whole process but all it really needs is a souped up RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification). So instead of running each product through a bar code scanner, each product would have a label containing a little chip that would transmit it's ID to a receptor wherever that receptor is located. It could be in the shopping cart or at the door. There might be a number of them located throughout the store. It's a bar code on steroids.

And for fast food - it will be automated too as advocated by Trump's pick for Secretary of Labor (now defunct), the owner of Carl's Jr and Hardee's, Andrew Puzder. No need for minimum wage workers any more. Robots don't require bathroom breaks or sick leave. Puzder can now get back to automating minimum wage workers out of his fast food chains.

Robot Baristas Will Make Your Coffee

It's not only grocery stores and supermarkets that will be automated. Robotic baristas will churn out your coffee drinks without the need for the intervention of human hands. Cafe X has created an automated barista and a “coffee shop”. According to Forbes:

Cafe X is 100% automated from the ordering and payment system that can be from within the app or the order/payment screens on the front of the system to the preparation and delivery of the coffee. The system is by far faster than any current coffee shop experience. Once the amortization of the system has been met, the cost to operate this “coffee shop” is orders of magnitude lower than the 2.5 baristas a single system replaces.

Franco’s barista was a robot. It’s part of an automated coffee shop called Cafe X — the latest example of the San Francisco’s dual infatuations: artisanal coffee and automated technology.

“It’s incredibly convenient,” said Franco, who has used Cafe X twice since it opened Jan. 30. “And the coffee is really good, too.”

Moments earlier, Franco had ordered her coffee using the Cafe X mobile app. Now a white robotic arm, the same kind used in car manufacturing facilities, was moving around a paper cup, pushing on syrup levers and brewing her a hot cup of coffee.

“I prefer this because you don’t have to wait,” said Franco, whose coffee was made in less than a minute. “It even accepts PayPal.” ...

On the speed front, Cafe X can make a hot espresso beverage in less than a minute and is able to pump out 120 coffee drinks in an hour. A Cafe X kiosk can occupy as little as 50 square feet, although its footprint in San Francisco’s Metreon shopping mall is a little over 100 square feet and was most recently home to another automated tenant: a Bank of America ATM.

Encased in plexiglass, the kiosk contains two coffee machines equipped to brew Americanos, espressos, cappuccinos, lattes and flat whites. Customers can order their drink from the Cafe X mobile app or at one of two iPads mounted outside the kiosk. The entire transaction is cashless, and customers even get a notification on their phone when their coffee is ready.

“It’s similar to calling an Uber,” said Hu, who sees his kiosk as filling a void. “It’s for people who want a grab-and-go coffee, who want consistency.” ...

As of May 2015, the largest overall occupations in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, were retail salespersons (4.6 million), cashiers (3.5 million), and food preparation and service workers (3.2 million).

Ford quotes the co-founder of a start-up dedicated to the automation of gourmet hamburger production: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Basically every job that doesn't have to do with the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector or the military-industrial complex is in the process of being eliminated. However, janitorial jobs, child care and fruit and vegetable picking will probably always be with us. It might be hard to get anyone to fill those job positions as Trump plans to deport most of the people who have been doing them. Any job that could remotely be considered manufacturing will be gone. That's why corporations are investing more in the US rather than abroad. However, their investments are not creating jobs; they're eliminating them.

During the recent Presidential campaign, much was said—most of it critical—about trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The argument, made by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, was that these deals have shafted middle-class workers by encouraging companies to move jobs to countries like China and Mexico, where wages are lower. Trump has vowed to renegotiate NAFTA and to withdraw from the T.P.P., and has threatened to slap tariffs on goods manufactured by American companies overseas. “Under a Trump Presidency, the American worker will finally have a President who will protect them and fight for them,” he has declared.

[But], such talk misses the point: trying to save jobs by tearing up trade deals is like applying leeches to a head wound. Industries in China are being automated just as fast as, if not faster than, those in the U.S. Foxconn, the world’s largest contract-electronics company, which has become famous for its city-size factories and grim working conditions, plans to automate a third of its positions out of existence by 2020.The South China Morning Post recently reported that, thanks to a significant investment in robots, the company already has succeeded in reducing the workforce at its plant in Kunshan, near Shanghai, from a hundred and ten thousand people to fifty thousand. “More companies are likely to follow suit,” a Kunshan official told the newspaper.

Jobs in Oil Fields Decline Despite Trump

So-called President Trump promised to bring back all those good paying blue collar jobs by going full steam ahead with oil production. But guess what? The oil companies are going full steam ahead with automation eliminating all those good paying jobs. Some of the workers losing their jobs in the oil patch are even migrating to the renewable energy industry! Did Trump get it wrong? In an article entitled Texas Oil Fields Rebound From Price Lull, But Jobs Are Left Behind, Clifford Krauss writes:

Oil and gas workers have traditionally had some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs — just the type that President Trump has vowed to preserve and bring back. But the West Texas oil fields, where activity is gearing back up as prices rebound, illustrate how difficult it will be to meet that goal. As in other industries, automation is creating a new demand for high-tech workers — sometimes hundreds of miles away in a control center — but their numbers don’t offset the ranks of field hands no longer required to sling chains and lift iron. ...

Indeed, computers now direct drill bits that were once directed manually. The wireless technology taking hold across the oil patch allows a handful of geoscientists and engineers to monitor the drilling and completion of multiple wells at a time — onshore or miles out to sea — and supervise immediate fixes when something goes wrong, all without leaving their desks. It is a world where rigs walk on their own legs and sensors on wells alert headquarters to a leak or loss of pressure, reducing the need for a technician to check.

The message is that blue collar jobs, jobs for those with only a high school education, are going bye-bye. There's not much that Trump can do about it to assuage his Red State base, the "forgotten men." So he will be left in the position of convincing them that those jobs have come back as an alternative fact of an alternative reality, something he and his cohorts are really good at.

Professional Jobs Will Be Taken Over By Robots Too

Machines are also getting smarter so that not only are they replacing manual laborers, but they are replacing people employed in white collar jobs as well. For instance, a highly skilled radiologist may soon be replaced by a machine whose powers of pattern recognition exceed those of humans. So while the doctor may find his job going by the wayside, his executive assistant's job could be more secure. After all bringing him his coffee and delivering it with a smile is something far more difficult for a robot.

The belief that the digital revolution, automation and robotization will create more jobs than they destroy is wishful thinking according to Charles Hugh Smith.

This faith that technology will magically create more jobs than it destroys is wishful thinking. This theology arose as a result of the transition from low-skill agricultural labor to low-skill factory labor in the First Industrial Revolution (1750 – 1860, steam, railways, factories, etc.) and the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1930) (mass production, electric lights, autos, aircraft, radio, telephones, movies). Each transition offered millions of new low-skill jobs to those displaced by technology and created increasing numbers of higher-skill jobs in design, technology, marketing and management. But history is not repeating itself in the latest Industrial revolution....

Since automation/software is now eating higher-skill jobs, advancing the skills of workers does not automatically create jobs for them. Pushing the entire populace to get a college diploma does not automatically create jobs that require college diplomas.

The conventional narrative overlooks a key dynamic in the Third Industrial Revolution: the number of skilled workers needed to eliminate entire industries of highly skilled employees is much smaller than the work forces being eliminated.

Some are suggesting that everyone needs to have a universal basic income since their labor power will not be needed in the future. Robert Reich thinks that there has to be a way to recycle money from the owners of the robots to all the people those robots will displace so that money can continue to circulate and the American economy which depends 70% on consumption will continue to function. How else are consumers to consume unless they have the wherewithal to do so? Researchers estimate that half of all US jobs will be automated in the next two decades.

Smith disagrees with Reich because he doesn't believe that taxing the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world will generate enough money to support the masses in a super welfare state. Besides that he doesn't believe that just being a consumer can ever satisfy human needs for having productive and dignified work. A society of people who do nothing but consume will lead not to a utopia but to a dystopia because human beings have a need to be something more than just consumers.

But perhaps both Smith and Reich miss the point. There is no need to recycle money from the taxation system to provide a basic income for everyone. A Central Bank that was controlled by the people instead of by Wall Street, which is what we have now, could generate money the way Abraham Lincoln did. Lincoln endorsed the printing of $450 million in US Notes or “greenbacks” during the Civil War. The greenbacks not only helped the Union win the war but triggered a period of robust national growth and saved the taxpayers about $14 billion in interest payments. Instead of debt based money created by Wall Street through loans, the government could just print and distribute it directly to the people.